On Olives and Sake

I share my birthday with the most adorable Katia, and celebrate it one day after Rime‘s and Mariyah‘s. Images and scents of the loveliest ladies surround and dizzy me, what more could a boy ask for!

August 8th, happens to be my birthday, and I shall reserve the right to indulge myself, and you, my dear readers, in this little trip down memory lane.

April 1987, Beit Jeddo’s terrace. I can’t even imagine what thoughts must’ve been going through his little head.

May 1988, Sanaa countryside, Yemen.

August 1989, Beirut, Lebanon.

August 1987.

January 1st, 1993.

Ssshhhhh! (1989)

Here I am again, sipping wine from the bottle, surrounded by the layers of take-out garbage that’s been piling around for a week now, this must be exam week.

It’s a Friday night, and I’ve guilt myself into staying home, but ended up sipping wine, smoking, dylanning and pondering endlessly about improbable questions of my own.

***

Her name has come up many times, too many for my own comfort, in the course of the last few weeks, in the most strange of coincidences. I still don’t know if this a simple conspiracy of life, or is one of my own mind to deny me any ability to focus on my Database Theory textbook. One thing is certain though, the thought is here to stay.

When I set out to write anything about her my thoughts start to confuse reality and fiction. They start to confuse what really happened with what imaginary conversations and events I’ve made up in days like this one. I confuse what I wrote once about her, with what she did.

A question she kept on dragging behind her was whether I did love her, or just wanted to love, and whether she did love me, or just wanted to be loved. I remember how grotesque the question and its whole premise was, I still do. Maybe my problem was, and apparently still is, that I’ve found love, in its most abstract shape, to be an entity completely independent of us people.

Don’t read too much into this, I am not dwelling over an end of a relationship. Not that one anyway, that one was bound to crash in the most painful of ways. Egypt and Japan are not even in the same continent and, I have no doubt, our worlds were much further apart.

Nonetheless, when you find out that you share a thought that is so transparent, like a dream, a thought so personal and so particular despite its many, many colors, when you share such a thought with someone, she becomes an integrate part of it. She blends with the background, a color of its own, and comes back with everyday as that thought eats into your mind.

You burn bridges and then beat your head against the wall.

Oh what an noisy gruesome world we live in these days. What a terrible way to burn bridges by ignoring emails and removing people from your Facebook friends. Oh dear!

There was a time when I wrote letters everyday, much like Issian of Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call. Letters that explained yesterday’s letter, and one’s that explained today’s. But unlike Issian, I did not mail them. They’re here. All these letters of madness that I wrote are here, as a comic and insightful testament to those days. They bring me sorrow because I was the one who wrote them, but mostly because I never put a stamp on them and mailed them.

***

She had the smile of Astarte, and eyes much like the sun. She had the passion of a million seas and the vengeances of a million humanities. Oh, what beautiful a color she’s made.

Sigma TV, that blessed Cypriot channel, reminds me of my 1990s more than anything else. Sigma reminds me of my first porn, my first infatuation with English and my first video of Michael Jackson. For a kid growing up with the brunt of Syria’s 90s, Sigma was a little place of solace. Sigma was where I first saw Basic Instinct, Apocalypse Now and Star Wars.

***

How can someone of my generation write about the 1990s? I never seize thinking of those days. I am, above all, a product of the 1990s sensory deprivation. The culmination of the autocracy and the implosion of every attempt to change in the mid 1980s, delivered us to a century of silence. It’s much more easier to track down the psychological impacts of these days than to actually remember how it happened.

The towering figurines of Hafez Assad looked down on me from every corner. It’s difficult to recall how a 10-year old child formed his complex relationship with those photos. In my earlier years, I was fully aware that these photos were the reason why my father lived in a far off city, why I had to lie about my name every time I was shipped to Beirut in the summer, and why my mother would speak very little about him in the presence of others. I saw the bitterness in her eyes, and I had nothing but hate for these photos.

In 1995, my father was somehow smuggled from Beirut to Latakia, and for the next 6 years, we lived, for the first time, like a normal family. Well, normal might be an overstatement considering that he had to hide in the bedroom closet whenever we had guests, but still, we lived all three of us in one house. My relationship with the photos changed.

I never saw bitterness in my father’s face, and when I told him that I hate them photos he smiled and said that hate is for defeated people. He brought laughter to the place, and he brought defiance to replace bitterness. My whole life had changed suddenly. The photos didn’t have that air of immortal fear and hatred anymore, they were photos of a mighty opponent, but one who couldn’t defeat defiance with bitterness. The fear, my father told me, is not but the reflection of fear in other people’s eyes. It is not but the reflection of the exasperation and desperation of what later became my forming century, the 1990s.

***

One of the scenes that will never leave my mind was the young lady crying helplessly as she reaches out to touch President Hafez Assad as he cast his ballot in the 1999 presidential referendum. He turns to her, smiles and hugs her. It moved me, and still does every time the footage is played again on television. I’ve made up many stories as to why that young lady was crying so emphatically. Many years later, as I read through my father’s diaries, I found these recollections of dream from April 1993.

He was attending some sort of a poetry reading, and Hafez Assad was present at the reading. As the night came to an end the room emptied and he found himself alone with the president. Assad came up to him and said, I have a feeling you want to talk to me about something. My father said, yes, but there’s something you need to know about me first. I am a member of Hizb al-Amal (Communist Labor Party). Hafez Assad, said with the most genuine surprise and pain, “But, Why?”

The dream was titled, “Stockholm syndrome.”

The 1990s were about to end, and with them the towering figurines of Hafez Assad. Within weeks my father would become, once again, a citizen.

***

The 90s are long over, and Michael Jackson is dead. There are very few of them towering figures now to look down on me and I don’t make much of an effort anymore to disguise my phone conversations. But I still don’t know how to write about those days. Memories from back then still come unexpectedly and leave me in a state of both confusion and contemplation.

Intoxication leaves me in the morning with an abundance of stills from the night before, and in a blur of the events. It leaves me with images of drinks being poured, sounds of laughter, shouting, inadvertent smells, and two lungs struggling for a breath in the midst of cigarettes smoke.

I wake up, fix my coffee and stare at my screen. Coffee instills them images, all of which completely unrelated and most of the time, out of place. I wake up with a pressing feeling of vanity and a desire to cough out everything I’ve ever read. I pick myself up to the washroom and I take a look at my face, swollen from sleep, and my eyes red with smoke.

It’s not that I feel my life slipping from me, far from it, I look at it and it feels, more than ever, like there’s absolutely no point to it. The most important feat any of us will come to achieve is to play a role in a process of natural selection, nothing more than a shrew (and this is not to undermine our ancestors’ honorable pursuits, in any way) did a few billion years back, but because I’m a human there will be, I suppose, a gravestone mentioning that somewhere. Something like a graduation certificate, “This man has carried his journey through the giant DNA soup, and we thereby declare him Dead.”

As we rant endlessly about our free choices in life, we forget that the very premise of “life” is inevitably predetermined.

The details of life, small or big, begin to crawl back upon me. An email here or a phone call there, news on the TV and words and words and words. They inconvenience my solitary disillusion with my transient existence.

Compromises come back in a rush; they weigh heavily on my soul. Places where I have mercilessly cut out a piece of me, so that the rest can carry on. It’s all very grotesque suddenly.

I smoke a cigarette and let my light-headedness take all of them away. I want this feeling of lightness to stay, I want to vomit out all my thoughts.

I feel condemned to life, and hope, and I don’t like it, not one bit.

The air reeks of smoke, and I open the window, but the whole city reeks of smoke. It reeks of smoke, and of the sweat of people running and crawling in pursuit of happiness.

This is madness. The only thought that runs through my mind as I take my shower is that, this is madness. And in two hours, I shall pick up my phone and walk back into this madness.

Of all the exquisite and the mesmerizing things that can be said about the beauty of a woman. About eyes as deep and wild as the Mediterranean on a stormy night, or of the creamy delicacy of her skin. About her faintly rouged cheeks, or of the element of subtle excitement filling her every move up to the tips of her rose-painted nails. Of all these little pleasures that tickle my heart at the sight of a beautiful woman, her laughter, alone, is what melts my heart like a fine piece of Brie.

That little sparkle in her eyes as she turns to you unexpectedly, sparks a fire in my heart that would last me many winters. The little tremors at the edge of her mouth, up to the tip of her nose, make my knees tremble and my heart dances like a million Alexis Zorba.

***

It was little after 8, I had finished my laborious Arabic class, and all I wanted was to smoke a quiet cigarette and listen to the random tunes of the band playing in the little plaza in Sakae. I sat down in utmost solitary while the whole of Nagoya was bustling around. A random smile, on the most beautiful face of the most perfect stranger, was all that I remember from that beautiful summer night.

***

At my 22, I am still as puzzled and inconsistent as I remember I was on my first day of school.

It was not scary, nor abhorrent, I remember. All I could think of, as my mom walked me to school that day, is that I will be doing this same thing for many more years than I could actually count on my fingers.

But for the next three years, I woke up everyday early morning, put on my brown uniform and hurriedly crossed the street to the little school near my grandparents house. Because she’ll be there in my desk with her funny ponytail and her exquisite smile will say “Sabah al-Kheir” and go on telling me how easy yesterday’s math assignment was.

***

Ever more, I grow detached to everything and everyone around me. I grow restless of my dreams, and desires, and fonder of my passions. I grow further apart from my home, and closer to those random strangers whom I’ve met, and will meet, somewhere over a glass of wine and danced with till the wee hours of the dawn.

***

In August, I fly to Korea.

ملء البطنة يذهب الفطنة. هذا صحيح، لكنه يذهب النوم أيضاً. رغم كل ارهاقاتي وانسطالي كان نومي قليلاً ومتقطعاً. هكذا صحوت قبيل الثالثة فجراً على ثورة السماء ورعودها وأمطارها وبروقها. ما أجمل صوت المطر، السيول، الميازيب، سياط الماء تلسع الاسفلت كجواد أدهم. أرقب الدنيا من النافذة وبيروت فارغة صامتة تصغي في هذه القطعة السوداء من ثوب الزمن التي سموها الليل.

لا شر خالصاً. في الشيء جوانبه المتعارضة. لذة الطعام ذهبت بمتعة النوم ونعمة الحلم. انقطاع النوم والأرق قاداني إلى النافذة والشعر وهكذا لكل ثانية من الوقت ملاكان/قوتان والإنسان يفني عمره هكذا، وفي النهاية الحظ هو الذي يحدد المصير.

لا أعرف من الذي ماثل بين ورق اللعب والحياة.

ففي ورق اللعب إمكانات مفتوحة لعدد لانهائي من الألعاب. ولكن لكل لعبة قانونها أو قوانينها واللاعب محكوم بتلك القوانين، وبراعته في اللعب وذكاؤه لهما دور هام في النتيجة، لكن حظه هو الحاكم الأكبر فيما يمنحه من الأوراق بل وحتى ذكاؤه هو مسألة حظ أيضاً.

كل مجموعة تختار لعبة، ونادراً ما يلعب إنسان مع نفسه دون الآخرين (كما يحصل في التبصير بالورق) ولكنه أيضاً محكوم بقوانين وأوراق وحظ. على كل حال ليست تلك المماثلة/المشابهة خاطئة. بل في نظري هي فكرة عبقرية تلك التي تربط بين اللعب والحياة، بالورق أو بسواه.

يشبه السياسيون العالم برقعة شطرنج أو دومينو أو… أو… حسب اتجاهاتهم. والحال أن الوضع لا يقتصر على السياسة ومستوياتها وتجلياتها. بل الحياة ككل. من ناحيتي أرى الحياة لعبة والأحياء لاعبين ولكن لكل شخصيته. فهذا يلعب من أجل الثروة وذاك من أجل الشهرة وثالث من أجل السيطرة والسلطة ورابع من أجل اللذة وخامس من أجل اللاشيء وهذا الأخير هو الأوسع انتشاراً ودوره في الواقع كالقاعدة التي تقوم عليها مشاريع جميع الأصناف الأخرى من اللاعبين.

لا حصر أوتصنيف للعبات أو اللاعبين غير أن ثمة نوعين هامين:

اللاعبون من أجل اللعب وحسب، وهم قلة لكنهم متواجدون في كل مكان وعلى جميع المستويات وفي كل زمان. واللاعبون من أجل تقويض جميع الألعاب لصالح لعبة واحدة رأوها في أحلامهم، أو جاءهم بها جد قديم أو مصلح أو ما شابه.

ذان النوعان من اللاعبين هما الأكثر صدقاً وعطاءً وتضحية.

ولكنهما الأقل حظاً في الانتصار. ومع الوقت، تتكاثر الألعاب الجديدة ويتكاثر اللاعبون وتتغير القوانين والأشكال والأدوات. لكن الجوهر يبقى لامعاً في العمق. الحياة لعبة واسعة وكل من يدخلها سيكون له موقعه شاء أو أبى. والحظ والبراعة هما عنصرا النجاح أو الفشل، لكن ما يحدد الإنسان في رأيي ليس نجاحه أو فشله إنما اختياره، أي لعبته.

رغم طاقاتي المتواضعة اخترت لعبة كبيرة ومعقدة ومرهقة. ومع أنها استغرقت عمري وكل ما أملك، فأنا ما زلت أجهل قوانينها. بل ولأعترف، كلما تعمقت فيها ازداد ضلالي. ولهذا صرت مقتنعا تماماً أنني لا أصلح للنجاح في أي جولة ومع أي فريق. لكنني لم أخطئ في اختياري، فالاختيارات الأخرى (الألعاب الأخرى) لا تغريني وأهلها أكثر بعداً عن ذوقي ومزاجي.

إن مبدأ لعبتي هو الحاسم في اختياري. إنني من الأعماق لا أجد نفسي إلا في تحويل تام للوسط في نمط الحياة والتفكير.

أحب أن أجتث الأمراض وأدفن الفقر وأعيد للطبيعة طبيعتها، أن أفجر في رأس الإنسان انسانيته، ليس من أجله بل من أجلي، فأنا أموت إن لم أتحرك وليس بوسعي الحركة في وسط ميت. أنا لست سياسياً ولا أصلح لذلك… إنني مثالي… رجل أفكار وأحلام… ولكنني لست مثالياً خالصاً أو حالماً صافياً، بل جندي في معركة المبادئ.

الشيوعية حلم ومشروع قابل للحياة. ولكن ليس بموارد اليوم. أقصد بإنسان اليوم. ليس ثمة أجهل من إنسان اليوم بمبادئ الماركسية، وأخص الماركسيين.

كأنه قدر محتوم أن يكون الأتباع وصمة عار على المبدع الذين يدعون اتباعه. المسلمون ومحمد، المسيحيون ويسوع، الماركسيون وماركس. هذه هي القاعدة والاستثناء يؤكد القاعدة في كثير من الأحيان. المبدع شهاب محترق بنفسه، طريقه حريقه، فوق المكان والزمان تلحق به مخلفات وأتربة، رماد وركام، ولا تطول الرحلة. هو يختفي في اللانهاية والأجسام الباهتة تسقط على المروج والورود ورؤوس الناس ولكن تجد من يتبرك بها كرمى للشهاب التي كانت تتبعه.

هل أنا شيوعي؟!

نعم ولا… في شيوعي ثوري صيم، وفي صوفي خالص وفي آخرون.

في فوضوي بوهيمي إباحي وفي ميتافيزيقي روحاني، وفي مجنون.

بل في آخرون وأخرون لا يعرفهم سوى علام الغيوب.

كيف جميع هؤلاء يتعايشون؟!

أنا نفسي لا أدري. لكنني أعتقد أن الحوار هو الذي يخلق السلام ويفسح المجال للتطور الحر والمستقل لكل شخصية.

إن الشيوعي مؤمن بحق الصوفي والصوفي يذبح نفسه في سبيل حرية البوهيمي، والجميع هكذا مؤمنون بالحرية في الاعتقاد والتفكير والحياة. والحرية في وعيهم الرفيع هي مسؤولية عن الذات والآخرين لأنها مسؤولية في ذاتها وعن ذاتها أولاً.

وأنا مستمتع بهؤلاء الساكنين المثقفين الصادقين.

كم أجدني سعيداً عندما يتحاور في ماركس والحلاج؟ كم هما رائعان منفرجا الأسارير متحابان محترمان مخلصان لقضية واحدة هي أن يتحد الإنسان بالله أو يصيره.

كم يروق لي أن أصغي لمحاورة هادئة وغنية بالتجارب والأفكار بين تروتسكي وبروتون أو ابن سيرين وفرويد.

هل أنا مادي؟!

نعم ولا… لقد استخدم مفهوم المدرحية في الفلسفة وأعجبني كثيراً.

إنني مدرحي، أحلم بثورة خالصة في الروح والمادة، أي في المبدع والمنتج. الانتاج للجسد، الابداع للروح. ليس كل منتج مبدع وكل مبدع منتج.

الفن أرقى من المهنة والروح أرقى من الجسد.

لست في معسكر: مادي أو روحي أو مدرحي، إلا من حيث توافق التسميات.

الجسم أعضاء وحركة والروح إلهام وقدرة.

الروح معنى والجسم صورة أو كلمة.

الخطوط، الرسوم، الرموز، الحروف، اللغات أشكال. تتغير وتتبدل مع العصور والأجسام والناس.

المعاني أكثر ثباتاُ وأقل تحولاً في الدائرة التي تدور وتدور.

يمضي الرؤاة ويدرسون والرؤية تزداد غموضاً وإغراءً.

يتتالى العشاق والمحبون والحب يبقى لغزاً مبهما وقدراً لا يواجه.

يتجدد الفرعون والسجن والطغاة وتنفر الدماء وتتدحرج حبات القلوب نحو الشجرة الأبدية التي يسمونها الحرية.

الخطوة والفكرة. يبدو من المستحيل توحيدهما ومن المستحيل فصلهما. متلازمان كالأنثى والذكر. متوالدان من سلالة تتوالد. نهر عظيم يشق صحارى الزمن منذ الأزل وإلى الأبد. كالليل والنهار، كالأرض والسماء، كالمهد والكفن.

جميع من في يتحاورون هذا الحوار، ويصمتون جميعاً باحترام وجلال ووقار للسيدة الحسناء التي تجلس في الصدر، ويهطع لها الجميع كأنها الآلهة يتوحدون عند أقدامها في كلمة واحدة: السلام عليك يا أمنا الحيرة…

نورالدين بدران – بيروت 5/3/1992

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having – human fulfilment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing – all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

It’s been raining all day and night today. It’s 6am and I still can’t go to sleep. It’s been months since I’ve had a normal night of sleep. Insomnia, at its best and worst, has become a life style.

Dates pass by without the slightest effort. The most remarkable thing of my last week in Syria is that I am back here in Japan. I finished two lousy books in two days, and translated a lousier document.

She called the day I came back, and we went out for a few drinks at the little bar down the road. She didn’t have that smell on her hair, that smell that I love so much. But I was still content to sit there and look in her eyes as she tried to explain her Japanese with her favorite language, hand gestures. She said I smoke too much, and I said she drinks too much. She said she has ghosts at her apartment and she can’t sleep until she’s too drunk, and I said I smoke my ghosts away with cigarettes. She laughed and told me that that’s nonsense, and I said I agree. The last time I had to deal with ghosts, things didn’t turn out well.

At the bar they call me the Spy, and she calls me the erorist. It always makes me laugh.

I’m so self-centered sometimes that I can’t finish a book if I can’t see myself in it. And I’m such a hypocrite sometimes that I say I’m an atheist when sometimes I feel that a deity lives in my heart. I’m neither. Love, in any sense, brings me closer to reverence and blasphemy till the point where my fingertips start burning before my eyes.

I want to be a pilot. I never feel safer than when I am flying. I never feel more energetic than when I am at an airport. And I never feel more articulate than when I am talking to a stranger. I never feel closer to God than when I am cursing him.

When I was a little kid I learnt how to talk to myself. I learnt how to make interesting conversations with my alter ego. I learnt how to lie about my father, and how to smile in the face of an insult. I learnt how to love from Jubran and my mother and how to hate from my extended family, and my Watan. When I told my father that I wanted to start a company in 1992, he helped me start a journal. When I told my father that Kinda, my cousin, said that liars burn in hell, he said that liars burn with the air they breathe, with the words they hear and by the eyes fixed on them, but not in hell.

I want to survive a tsunami and to wrap my self around a bomb that’s about to explode. I want to stop a speeding train and to fly over the top of Tokyo tower. I want to run until I lose breath then smoke a cigarette over a cliff in Koh Tao. I want to make love on a little distant beach in Latakia and then swim naked until the morning lights. I want to cut all these threads that connect me to this place called Watan, then run to it because I want to.

My Astarte said, as she put off her cigarette and headed off to bed, that she was going to be my Watan. I kissed her shivering shoulders and lulled her to sleep. I laughed, at her presumptuous offer and my inner content with it, and then cried myself to sleep. That was in September 2007.

No one can give you a Watan, not even 18,000,000 people; no one can give you a Watan if you can’t find it inside. No one can lead you to God, not even 124,000 prophets; no one can lead you to God unless you make your own.

I say, make it out of love, tears and laughter. And then rest on the seventh day, content with the fact that you have a God.

I packed my stuff in the back of the car, buckled my safety belt and tried as hard as I could to keep a polite interest in my uncle’s small talk on our way to the airport.

***

Everyone I’ve met, at some point or another, brings up that dreadful question, “What do you want to do when you finish your degree?” To which I have a very simple answer, “I really don’t know.”

***

A three-minute stroll along al-Thawra street in Damascus, can single handedly crush all disillusion in any future, present or past for this little country.

***

The taxi driver smiled as his car ran quietly over the neatly lined asphalt on the new highway to Dummar. He looked up to the mountain in the distance and said quietly, as to not let me even hear him, “Don’t you wish the presidential palace overlooked all of the streets in Damascus?”

***

A dear friend of my family lost his mother on my first day in Syria. In her eulogy, two men spoke. The Sheikh who prayed for God to have mercy on her, bring her closer to him in the heaves and to protect the leader of our nation. The other was the friend who grieved for his mother and lamented the lack of freedoms and the rampant corruption.

***

Damascus is becoming everything that I hate about Cairo and Beirut. Latakia is becoming a complete and perfect nothing. And I am falling more and more in love with airports.

…We did this: